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...Optimalist" Most people would define optimism as being eternally hopeful, endlessly happy, with a glass that's perpetually half full. But that's exactly the kind of deluded cheerfulness that positive psychologists wouldn't recommend. "Healthy optimism means being in touch with reality," says Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard professor who taught the university's most popular course, Positive Psychology, from 2002 to 2008. "It certainly doesn't mean being Pollyannaish and thinking everything is great and wonderful...
Accept Pain and Sadness Being optimistic doesn't mean shutting out sad or painful emotions. As a clinical psychologist, Martin Seligman, who runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says he used to feel proud whenever he helped depressed patients rid themselves of sadness, anxiety or anger. "I thought I would get a happy person," he says. "But I never did. What I got was an empty person." That's what prompted him to launch the field of positive psychology, with a groundbreaking address to the American Psychological Association in 1998. Instead of focusing only on righting...
...knew, in our heart of hearts, that something had to give. Remember when each decade, not long after it finished, assumed a distinct character? We all knew and know what "the '50s" mean, and they definitively ended with the Pill, J.F.K.'s assassination and the Beatles - just as "the '60s" ended when Americans got tired of being alarmed and hectored, and "the '70s" ended when stimulants became more popular than depressants and AIDS appeared. But in all salient respects, "the '80s" - Reaganism's reshaping of the political economy, the thrall of the PC, the vertiginous rise in the stock market...
...year? We had no idea. Recently Rush Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, panicking not so much about the economy but about how the political winds are blowing as a result. If we finally manage to achieve something like universal health care, Limbaugh warned, it would mean "the end of America as we know it." He's right, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is the end of the world as we've known it. But it isn't the end of the world...
...present chastening can't mean turning into a nation of overcautious, unambitious scaredy-cats. This is the moment for business to think different and think big. The great dying off of quintessentially 20th century businesses presents vast opportunity for entrepreneurs. People will still need (greener) cars, still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings - that is, the people burning to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and media in new, economic ways...